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The West fertilizer explosion killed 15 and injured hundreds more in April 2013.

Sixteen chemical-industry groups told the White House on Monday that imposing new safety regulations is unnecessary and more attention should instead go toward improving emergency response.

The groups’ four-page letter to President Barack Obama comes as a team of federal agencies work on overhauling U.S. chemical safety oversight following last year’s deadly West explosion. The team is expected to submit its recommendations later in May.

Meanwhile, industry groups have been proposing their own fixes in hopes of averting a crackdown. The White House letter was signed by groups with Capitol Hill clout, including the American Chemistry Council.

“The chemical industry is one of the most regulated industries in the world, and data show that the industry also is one of the safest,” the groups contend.

Our analysis of more than 750,000 incident reports last year, however, provides a different conclusion: that 90 percent of all available data regarding chemical accidents are wrong. Obama asked the federal team to consider creating more feasible means of collecting and sharing data on chemical-safety storage and incidents.

Republican wunderkind and Texas-raised Rand Paul made a bold prediction while stumping for Sen. John Cornyn this past weekend: Texas could see itself tip in favor of the Democrats in the next decade unless the Grand Old Party transforms itself.

“That doesn’t mean we give up on what we believe in, but it means we have to be a more welcoming party,” said Paul, according to a post on CNN’s Political Ticker blog. “We have to welcome people of all races. We need to welcome people of all classes – business class, working class.”

National Football League commissioner Roger Goodell (left), speaking with Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, made more than $29 million in compensation in 2011, according to the NFL's most-recent Form 990 filing with the Internal Revenue Service.

Next weekend, the National Football League will crown its Super Bowl champion. Commissioner Roger Goodell will be front and center, before a television audience in the billions, to present either the Denver Broncos or Seattle Seahawks with the shiny Lombardi Trophy.

This season is sure to be another cash haul for the league. But, that doesn’t mean the NFL will be cash-strapped when it comes time to pay Uncle Sam. Ever since 1966, the NFL has been a tax-exempt entity in the eyes of the Internal Revenue Service.

The NFL describes itself as a “trade association promoting interests of its 32 member clubs” in its most-recent tax filing with the IRS. What’s interesting to note: only the league office has the tax exemptions; the for-profit clubs must pay their own taxes.

The demolition of West High School began last month. A new school should be ready to open on the same site in 2015. (Matt Jacob, staff writer)

I’ve traveled by West, Texas, many times in the last year. Despite numerous stops to sample the town’s famous kolaches, I hadn’t actually visited the site where tons of ammonium nitrate forever changed the lives of the town’s 2,800 residents.

Many of my colleagues have spoken at length with residents about how they’re coping after the blast. But as a data analyst, the types of stories I write don’t require me to be out in the field much (and I didn’t want to get in the way).

As a data specialist, I work daily to help incorporate the wealth of information from large datasets into our stories. It’s a term called “big data.”

Just hearing those words is enough to make some think the concept is too complex to understand. But those numbers are crucial in identifying trends and telling stories without relying only on an official’s word.

This hits a little close to home for me, someone who’s played tennis competitively for more than 25 years. As Matt Cronin of tennis.com first reported, the Women’s Tennis Association board of directors is debating whether to give its players and coaches instant access to match data via smartphones beginning in 2015. WTA Tour-partner SAP currently makes the point-by-point stats available, but only after matches are completed.

This isn’t the first time the WTA has tried something innovative. The women’s tennis organizing body began allowing on-court coaching at all non-Grand Slam tournaments in 2009. Its male counterpart, the Association of Tennis Professionals, has yet to follow suit.

I might have a general idea that my down-the-line forehands were winning more points for me than topspin backhands or that my slice serve to the body generated more receiving errors from my opponent. But how nice would be to actually sit down during a changeover, take out my smartphone and see what the actual stats tell me about my game and what shot I should consider hitting at a certain point in the match?

Then again, many tennis purists believe players should think for themselves on the court and not rely on anyone (or anything) else to get them through a match. Just because technology makes something possible, does that mean it should be adopted?

In a series of articles published last weekend, we call attention to the 2007 Texas law designed to keep ammonium nitrate secure. The Office of the Texas State Chemist has been tasked with enforcing that law and, among its other responsibilities, inspecting the facilities licensed to handle ammonium nitrate.

But what have agency administrators told us about the inspectors who visit these places?

The state chemist’s office employs 14 inspectors to enforce parts of Texas’ lengthy agriculture code. Each one is assigned to a different region of the state and calls on a variety of different businesses, small to large.

Inspectors are required to have a bachelor of science degree in agriculture, chemistry, or a related field. Most of their job is spent taking samples of feed and fertilizer so that the laboratory at Texas A&M can analyzes whether there are contaminants that could harm people, animals, and the environment. Also, the inspectors verify whether product labels are accurate.

Ron Baselice/Staff Photographer

Inspectors from the Office of the State Chemist conduct annual inspections of facilities that apply for a permit to handle ammonium nitrate.

For the purposes of ammonium nitrate facilities, inspectors conduct annual assessments of facilities that either apply for a new permit to handle the potentially explosive chemical compound or want to renew their existing permit. According to reports it released to The News, the state chemist’s office conducted 746 such inspections from fiscal-years 2008 to 2013.

Agency administrators said, on average, an annual inspection – which for this time period consisted of a 10-item checklist – takes four hours to complete. That checklist has since been increased to more than a dozen questions.

The inspection reports the state’s chemist office provided were heavily redacted, with all references to the names of facilities and their addresses missing.

The News, however, created its own database in an effort to gauge how frequent the inspectors called on their assigned facilities based on the date of inspection listed on the reports and the name of the inspectors. That analysis showed that – on numerous occasions – the date of inspection listed on the reports indicate that inspectors sometimes visited four and five facilities a day to conduct ammonium nitrate inspections.

Inspectors also provided differing amounts of written information on the comments and observation sections of the reports. Some inspectors were diligent in writing notes in the comment fields for each checklist statement as well as providing lengthy commentary at the end of the inspection. Others, though, simply marked “yes,” “no” or “not applicable” responses to the statements and wrote only a few words in the overall observation section – in many cases, inspectors left that portion blank altogether.

Here are two examples of actual inspection reports that help characterize the inconsistencies:

Blake Stiles wasn’t superintendent of Athens ISD when the district, in 2000, built Athens Middle School on its current site – at the corner of State Highway 19 and FM 753. He said district leaders back then knew a fertilizer facility – El Dorado Chemical Co. – would be directly across the street from the school. But that didn’t deter the district from building the school.

We briefly mentioned El Dorado in our Sunday investigation about a 2007 Texas law designed to keep ammonium nitrate secure. According to its most recent filing with the Texas Department of State Health Services, this El Dorado site could have had between 50 and 500 tons of ammonium nitrate at any one time in 2012.

“I don’t know they knew the quantity of what could be there on a daily basis,” Stiles said. “And I don’t know if, at the time, that was as high on their radar as it would be today.”

William G. Howell, author of Thinking About the Presidency: The Primacy of Power, has written extensively on presidential usage of executive orders. Howell points to a startling fact: from 1945 to 1998, there were roughly 80 challenges to a sitting president’s executive order – and the president won a staggering 83 percent of those instances.

“The federal judiciary has a powerful incentive not to step in and overturn a presidential action,” said Howell, an American politics professor at the University of Chicago. “Not the least because the courts rely on the president in particular – but the executive branch, more generally – to enforce their rulings. It’s a structural feature of judicial-executive relationships.”

Howell added that “rarely, rarely, rarely” does Congress act on executive orders, other than to codify the action into law or appropriate funds for the initiatives.

After the explosion at the West Fertilizer Co. last week that killed more than a dozen people, The Dallas Morning News and several other news organizations sought information from the Office of the Texas State Chemist.

Among the records sought were state inspection reports from the West facility, and any occurrences of fines or regulatory violations. The News also asked for a list of businesses in Texas that sell or store ammonium nitrate, the material believed to have exploded in West. The newspaper hoped to let readers know if any other such stockpiles existed near schools, apartment buildings and nursing homes, as was the case in West.

On Monday, the Texas A&M University System, which houses the state chemist’s office, appealed the release of those records. In its appeal to the Texas attorney general’s office, A&M’s general counsel said, “We believe a portion of the requested information is confidential and excepted from disclosure.”

A copy of the letter to the attorney general was sent to The News by A&M, but much of it was redacted. That’s because, in the A&M lawyer’s words, “our arguments reveal the substance of the information requested.”

The A.G. now has 45 business days to render an opinion on whether the records should be released.